Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Monday food pics

I've been trying to figure out a better way of getting a handle on what I'm doing, and I have to say that I'm totally resistant to going back to a conventional food diary because I get a little obsessive and weird about it. To say the least. And it's hard for me not to bug Michael about food when I'm writing down everything, and believe me, this is Never A Good Thing. Dr. Mike Eades did this a while ago on the Protein Power blog, so I thought I'd give this a shot... partly because it's different and partly because I found it kind of fascinating in some strange way to see exactly what someone else was eating.

This is kind of fiddly, and I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, but I'm going to try to do this for at least a week.

I should say that I try to keep carbs below 40 at absolute max, and I try to keep calories around 1500 or so because if I'm much below that I become a little crazy hungry, and it is not pretty. And I eat a little more weirdly on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday when I teach and thus can't do as much food prep. I also drink a LOT of tea with a little whole milk or cream.

First we had a protein shake... whey protein, almond milk, liquid vitamins. I know that this totally looks like an ad for Almond Breeze (which, I have to say, is genuinely a great product if a little pricey... low calorie, low carb, and gives you a little protein).

Then I had 1/8 of this beautiful quiche (recipe here), which is a bit less than 200 calories a slice. No crust, almost no carbs.

This was a teaching day for me, so I didn't really eat lunch... instead I had this, which I have to admit that I like but is too high carb for my liking and is also Not Real Food.

When I came home, I had half of a sausage that I'd cooked the night before (125 calories) and a little cabbage that I'd stir-fried. It's hard to tell portion sizes on these plates, but that's maybe 1/2 cup of cabbage. One of the things that I've learned doing this is that it's hard to take good food pics (I have to say that this looks revolting), and that it's impossible to get any sense of scale.

Dinner was the big meal. This is a rib-eye steak, about 8 oz. (and that's where I really could have had only half), cauliflower puree, broccoli, and the brown stuff is a couple of tablespoons of this strange "culinary" gravy that we'd gotten a free sample of from the store (the boys loved it, I was not crazy about it, and isn't calling it "culinary" kind of redundant? Unless they also sell, say, floor-cleaning gravy?)

And I had one of these, also Not Real Food.

In the middle of the night I got up and had a small handful of these pork rinds (about 80 calories, and yes, I could have skipped that...).

All of this, fine from a carb point of view. Without carefully counting the calories, I'd say, this is over the range that I shoot for though not a lot, and you have to call the culprit the steak. And to be honest, I knew at the time that it was really too much, but I was hungry and had eaten little all day, and thus I let its low-carbness outweigh its size.

And now I will leave you with a bonus picture of my adorable cat sleeping.

2 comments:

They taste like CRUNCH. Which is hard to find if you don't eat flour and corn and things like that.

That's actually mostly what they taste like to me... like a really thick potato chip with a very slight tinge of meat, which I know sounds weird, but... You can get steak flavored potato chips in the UK, so I guess it's not totally strange.

They are also strangely useful in cooking if you don't use flour... you can make a great breading with them, and in that kind of use, they don't taste like pork at all.

You can also get them in pseudo-potato chip flavors like barbecue but I think these are vile.

"Rind" is really the wrong name... they're sort of puffed skin which I admit also sounds unappetizing. In Mexican stores, they're usually called chicharrones (probably misspelled) which sounds a lot better because I have no idea what it means.